"I have travelled quite a lot and I have met so-called 'primitive' people abroad. King believes this may be because of his itinerant postwar career in the British Council, which saw him work in Amsterdam, Belfast, Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Dhaka and Madras. It would be easy for a portrait of a stone-age man written in the 1960s to make a contemporary reader cringe but, re-reading Stig of the Dump as an adult, I was struck by the sensitivity of King's portrayal of not just the imaginative interior life of a young boy but also of a caveman of indeterminate age whose "hands looked cleverer than his face". "Of course there wasn't actually a stone-age man living in a cave at the bottom of it, but Ash was a very boring place to live and I thought what it needs is something to wake it up, so I invented Stig." "My experience of the chalk pit was doubly enforced – I saw it through my own eyes and I saw it through the eyes of my children," he says. King based Barney's experiences in the chalk pit on his own explorations of the dump by his parents' home close to the village of Ash on the North Downs of Kent in the 1930s, and watching his own son, nicknamed Barney, do the same two decades later. "It was beginning to be rather improper to let a child run wild like that," he says.
Few eight-year-olds today are likely to experience this sort of outdoor adventure: Barney wanders off for whole days alone without adults worrying about him, hanging out in a dump that would now be fenced off.īut King thinks one reason his manuscript was rejected by 12 publishers was because its portrayal of children roaming free was already frowned upon in the 60s. The story of eight-year-old Barney, who tumbles into a rubbish-strewn chalk pit and befriends Stig, strikingly illustrates how child's play has been transformed over the past five decades. Fiona Reynolds, former director general of the National Trust and a key player in the charity's campaign for a "natural childhood", is also a fan and many young readers still enjoy the book for its vivid dramatisation of that universal childhood experience – "believing in something that no one else believes in," as my 12-year-old niece puts it. He still receives fan mail posing questions that he has been asked for six decades – Is Stig real? Is the chalk pit real? Everyone from Hugh Bonneville to David Walliams has cited Stig of the Dump as an inspiration but it is not just a book beloved of boys of a certain vintage (for whom "Stig" was a schoolyard insult). The recognition that every author craves, however, is simply being read, and King has always had that in abundance. This year King was also belatedly awarded an Arctic Cross medal for his role in the Arctic convoys, the naval operation to ship goods to Russia during the second world war, which was described by Churchill as "the worst journey in the world". King's best-known book is the subject of a Radio 4 documentary, Stig at Fifty, to be broadcast on Christmas Day and Stig will also be read by Andrew Lincoln on Radio 4 Extra in the week after Christmas.
A slow-burning success, Stig of the Dump missed out on the Carnegie Medal when it was published in 1963 and failed to win the "Puffin of Puffins" (which went to Eoin Colfer's modern bestseller Artemis Fowl) when the children's imprint celebrated its 70th birthday three years ago.īut recognition, in a variety of forms, may be belatedly arriving. King, who lives a somewhat ascetic existence with his second wife, Penny, in their mostly self-built home on the edge of a Norfolk marsh, has never enjoyed enormous acclaim. King's ability to be some years ahead of current thinking on everything from immigration to hunting may be one reason why Stig is still in print, and perhaps more pertinent than ever.
Other social trends and attitudes examined by the 89-year-old author in the 16 books he has written for young people have also resurfaced as contemporary concerns.
Like Stig, who is 50 years old this year, King was an exemplar of recycling long before it became fashionable. The author of Stig of the Dump doesn't exactly live like a rubbish-tip dwelling caveman – as far as I can tell, King's water supply is not acquired via a bicycle mudguard feeding rainwater through a vacuum cleaner tube into an old can of weedkiller – but it is easy to see from where his stone-age creation acquired his ingenuity. If ever a house embodied one of the strangest and most enduring characters of children's literature, it is Clive King's.
T he kitchen units are oak panels from an old library, the floors are salvaged wooden blocks from a former laboratory and an old milk churn is a walking-stick holder.